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Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

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Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#21

Post by epgui »

QasimK wrote: post #20
epgui wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't give medical advice on the internet, especially without specifying what the advice is for, or without knowing what condition the other person has. It's obviously well intentioned, but incredibly reckless.

Do you really think someone is going to read that, start ignoring their doctors, throw all their medicine in the bin, and become some kind of natto evangelist? It’s a common Japanese food and he just said give it a go.

Yeah actually, that would be an unsurprising (but clearly bad) layperson's reading.

If the last two years should have taught us anything, it's that even otherwise intelligent people will interpret perfectly reasonable, specific and precise health advice in the worst possible way.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#22

Post by toshk »

The_rationalist wrote: post #2

An open question would be wether the baseline inflammation level could be lowered if we implemented a periodic but rarer higher inflammatory level. So a ~flatline vs a sinusoid. It could be pharmacologically simulated.

Somewhat related to your idea, they seem to have some success with parasitic therapy with things like Crone. Introduce a "harmless" parasite (worm) and the body's immunesystem to trigger it. Not sure how long they keep it in the body, seems to be mostly for a longer time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#23

Post by Broken_Hippo »

QasimK wrote: post #20
epgui wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't give medical advice on the internet, especially without specifying what the advice is for, or without knowing what condition the other person has. It's obviously well intentioned, but incredibly reckless.

Do you really think someone is going to read that, start ignoring their doctors, throw all their medicine in the bin, and become some kind of natto evangelist? It’s a common Japanese food and he just said give it a go.

Do you really think someone is going to read that, start ignoring their doctors, throw all their medicine in the bin, and become some kind of natto evangelist?

Most folks don't become an evangelist! The rest, though - yeah, it happens. People get sold sham cures and diets all the time and dismiss proven treatments. Even when folks do not dismiss modern medicine and are doing things that aren't actively harmful, alternatives tend to delay proven treatments.

Additionally, if you cannot afford medical treatment and you are presented with some "cure" that seems be a small fraction of the cost, it gets easier to justify whatever sham cure the person is trying to push.

'just try it out' comes with responsibility when you are talking medicine as it can snowball into something else.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#24

Post by Broken_Hippo »

epgui wrote: post #12
treeman79 wrote: post #6

Fun fact. Many autoimmune issues can be triggered / worsened by diet. There is an auto immune protocol diet that is all about reducing inflammation. Spend a few months on any of the support forms and you’ll see a pattern where people take years to be diagnosed. Most have a mystery illness for several years before it’s diagnosed. Then they go through years of various medication options with mixed results. Eventually m…

While it is true that diet can have a big impact on inflammation, I would caution against pushing this idea too far in the context of auto-immune diseases. I won't go into the details or talk about any specific condition because it's a complex topic, but you're better off combining a mediterranean / Indian / varied diet (the American diet is notoriously bad) with proper medication as prescribed by your treating physi…

So. Much. This.

I have Multiple Sclerosis, and there are slews of sham diets out there. None, of course, have been actually proven effective even though one specific person definitely claims to have cured their MS through diet.

It isn't even that I mind folks trying diets out - but the only thing (so far) that tends to lessen the disease over time are medicines. These medicines are expensive and tend to have side effects. There is no good reason health care systems (private or taxpayer funded) would cover the drugs if they could just pay for someone's diet and get results instead.

Note: Not saying diet will never be part of treatment, mind you, but we aren't there yet.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#25

Post by urban_strike »

themodelplumber wrote: post #8
treeman79 wrote: post #6

Fun fact. Many autoimmune issues can be triggered / worsened by diet. There is an auto immune protocol diet that is all about reducing inflammation. Spend a few months on any of the support forms and you’ll see a pattern where people take years to be diagnosed. Most have a mystery illness for several years before it’s diagnosed. Then they go through years of various medication options with mixed results. Eventually m…

I was on the AIP diet for a while, quite a long time ago. It wasn't the end-all solution for me that others proclaimed it was, but it was nice to have something new to try.

For what it's worth, I had a similar experience trying a strict AIP diet for a few months - some improvements in my autoimmune symptoms (some psorasis I've had since childhood), but nothing definitive. When I tried a strict carnviore diet, basically cutting out the vegetable and fruits allowed on AIP, my existing patches of psoriasis disappeared over a few weeks, and no new ones appeared.

Since then I've gone on and off of strict carnivore, but anytime I reintroduce vegetables and/or some other carb sources, I'll start to see new patches of psoriasis pop back up within a 2 or 3 weeks usually. So I usually balance on that line now, returning to carnivore if my symptoms start to bother me too much.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#26

Post by krageon »

epgui wrote: post #14
Melatonic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of personal theories on this but if you have what I think you might have I would highly recommend trying a Japanese fermented food called Natto. It is some real weird stuff in terms of texture and smell but the benefits are massive at least for myself. I tried everything out there and saw tons of doctors and while some things helped consistently eating this stuff keeps my immune system in check better th…

Please don't give medical advice on the internet, especially without specifying what the advice is for, or without knowing what condition the other person has. It's obviously well intentioned, but incredibly reckless.

It's not reckless to recommend someone try a food and see if it helps them feel better. Trying diverse foods is nice (as in, good for the variation in life) and in this case it may transcend the immediate niceness into a generalised well-being. Nobody here is recommending natto instead of whatever your doctor prescribes (which I guess you are implying) and you'd have to be severely mentally handicapped to assume this is what was written. In such a scenario you should not touch the internet unsupervised anyway, because all sorts of normal statements become potentially dangerous.

In short: Real life shouldn't have to be a ball-pit surrounded by rubber tiles. We're all adults here.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#27

Post by zby »

I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state and that we just need to avoid stuff that leads to deviation from that state. We keep discovering that a thing is correlated with one bad symptom - but the lack of said thing is correlated with a different bad symptom and we believe that there is one perfect level that thing that would let us live with neither of these bad things. There probably isn't.

It probably used to be a good abstraction - because we had so many things that obviously harmed us so we tended to remove them from our lives and that was improvement. But now in the developed countries we live in an environment that is mostly cleaned from these obviously harmful things - what is left is all the exceptions.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#28

Post by Hedepig »

zby wrote: post #27

I think we need to let go the paradigm that there is a 'good health' state and that we just need to avoid stuff that leads to deviation from that state. We keep discovering that a thing is correlated with one bad symptom - but the lack of said thing is correlated with a different bad symptom and we believe that there is one perfect level that thing that would let us live with neither of these bad things. There probab…

Perhaps slightly tangential - I listened to a set of lectures on genetics[0], one of the biggest takeaways for me was that although it's apparent diet is one of the largest[1] (I forget if it is the largest) factors in cancer rates, we aren't sure which foods in particular cause dramatic increases or decreases in cancer probability

[0] - https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/understanding-geneti... [1] - we believe it is a large factor due to the fact migrants adopt the same cancer rate when they join the native population

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#29

Post by imtringued »

treeman79 wrote: post #6

Fun fact. Many autoimmune issues can be triggered / worsened by diet. There is an auto immune protocol diet that is all about reducing inflammation. Spend a few months on any of the support forms and you’ll see a pattern where people take years to be diagnosed. Most have a mystery illness for several years before it’s diagnosed. Then they go through years of various medication options with mixed results. Eventually m…

The gluten in wheat causes leaky gut syndrome which lets other substances go into the blood stream for which people may have an auto immune disease.

Re: Why is inflammation a dangerous necessity?

#30

Post by imtringued »

epgui wrote: post #14
Melatonic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of personal theories on this but if you have what I think you might have I would highly recommend trying a Japanese fermented food called Natto. It is some real weird stuff in terms of texture and smell but the benefits are massive at least for myself. I tried everything out there and saw tons of doctors and while some things helped consistently eating this stuff keeps my immune system in check better th…

Please don't give medical advice on the internet, especially without specifying what the advice is for, or without knowing what condition the other person has. It's obviously well intentioned, but incredibly reckless.

It's far more reckless to tell people to do something specific because they supposedly have a very specific disease because it is very easy to misdiagnose symptoms.

There are so many symptoms that could either be something harmless (that can be fixed with a diverse non specific diet) or be cancer. If you spend too much time on medical websites trying to self diagnose you are at some point going to convince yourself that you have the worst disease of all the potential options.

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